As data center or enterprise networking customers grow larger and larger through an increase in market share or through mergers and acquisitions of other entities, the need to manage the customer's information technology (IT) and networking infrastructure becomes more complex and difficult. In particular, enterprise customers will often maintain a data center or multiple data centers by creating a virtual local area network (VLAN). Through the VLAN, virtual machines (VMs) or containers may be established within the network to facilitate communication between components of the sites or data centers. However, aggregating additional VLANs with an existing site (such as through a merger or acquisition of another business that operate their own individual network) may create a logistical challenge to the IT specialists of the enterprise customer. This problem increases many fold when virtualization techniques like containers are deployed by the organizations within the network sites or VLANs.
For mid to large size enterprise customers, operations are much simplified if each site can be managed separately and coordination is only needed at the boundary of the network for the VLANs that need to communicate with each other. This improves scale, reduces cost of operations, and creates smaller failure domains. As companies grow by acquisitions and interconnected sites, they also run into issues of VLAN shortage and/or VLAN overlap. All these problems are expounded if they have multiple sites. It is more efficient for the organization if the current VLAN allocations are retained and each site has its own independent VLAN space.
In many instances, applications running on an enterprise network across multiple sites or locations utilize Layer 2 connections or communications between the sites to function. To stitch enterprise networks together at a Layer 2 level is typically done through manual data center interconnect techniques. In other words, network administrators or IT specialists access components of each enterprise network to be stitched and configure one or more of the components in an attempt to allow the enterprise networks to communicate. This manual configuration of the networks has quickly become more complex and difficult as such networks continue to expand. The introduction of virtual machines and containers within the networks add another level of complexity to the data center interconnection, to the point of becoming unmanageable.